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With the DOJ’s failure to prosecute the Bush Six and other torturers, Spain has a legal obligation to ensure impunity does not cross borders

Guantanamo Bay (Photo: US Army / Flickr)

It has become abundantly clear that the U.S. government has no intention to prosecute anyone within its ranks for the Bush administration’s torture program. This unwillingness underscores the urgent need for other countries to act on behalf of the global community and ensure these officials face justice. In the next couple of months, Spain will have the opportunity to do precisely that.

Ten years after the infamous ‘torture memos’ and with no prosecutions of any high-level U.S. officials, any remaining doubts about the United States’ commitment to addressing the abuses of the Bush era were put to rest by the recent announcement from the Justice Department that it would not charge anyone involved in the torture of over 100 men held in CIA-run prisons overseas, and the deaths of two men in custody.

Back in 2009, securing the outcome of this investigation before it even opened, Attorney General Eric Holder emphasized that the DOJ would not prosecute “anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.” By placing this ‘legal guidance,’ a euphemism for the infamous torture memos, outside the scope of any investigation, Holder effectively ensured that no government personnel – from the Bush administration lawyers who approved the torture program to those who implemented it – would be prosecuted for state crimes.

But the United States’ failure to investigate and prosecute its own officials’ acts of torture does not mean that these crimes will go unpunished—or that impunity will prevail.

In Spain, there is currently one open criminal investigation into the U.S. torture program. While it is proceeding slowly, this case has a broad mandate: to examine “an authorized and systematic plan of torture and ill-treatment on persons deprived of their freedom without any charge and without the basic rights of any detainee, set out and required by applicable international conventions.”

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